From the teachers to the traditions and general atmosphere, FHS 30 years ago was a very different place than it is now. 1991 graduate Kory Keller (my dad) shared his high school experience to give a little perspective on what things were like “back in the day.”

“The seniors and the freshman competed against the sophomores and juniors for who could make the biggest bonfire out at the parking lot by the fairgrounds. We’d light it and have a big ol’ party out there. It was kind of a Homecoming thing,” Keller said.

“It was a blast except that our senior year was the last year they did it because we were too wild about it. We brought heavy equipment out to stack the wood and fluff up the piles. They got a few stories tall, and I guess the administration didn’t like that too much.”

Back in the day, leaving school for lunch was not the coveted privilege it is now. “Most of us went to town all four years of high school for lunch,” Keller said. “I actually never went into the cafeteria.”

Policies on guns were just starting to be enforced. In 1991, students were told to stop bringing guns to school. A lot of high schoolers would go hunting on the weekends and leave guns in their trucks.

“When they called us into the office after finding guns in our trucks, they would ask if we had been hunting that weekend, and if the answer was yes, most of the time they would just let us go and tell us not to do it again.”

Teachers had also recently stopped giving licks to students (paddling). “My English teacher in the 8th grade had a hand-carved paddle with holes in it to reduce wind resistance during use, and he hung it on the wall for all to see. Its name was Excalabutt,” Keller said.

Some of the high school teachers were a little more laid back than society allows today.

“Back in the day, a few teachers would come to the ranch with us and sit around the fire and tell stories,” Keller said. “Then we would come back to school on Monday, and nobody said a word, but we respected each other more and worked harder for those teachers.”

It’s definitely very interesting to see how much FHS has changed through the years and it makes you wonder what students 30 years from now will think about us and our high school experience.